The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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Realism in the Visual Arts

Science and Technology

CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style 93

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The Birth of Photography

One of the most significant factors in the development of
the materialist mentality was the birth of photography.
While a painting or an engraving might bring to life
the content of the artist’s imagination, a photograph
offered an authentic record of a moment vanished in time.
Unlike the camera obscura, which only captured an image
briefly (see chapter 23), the photograph fixed and pre-
served reality.
Photography—literally “writing with light”—had its
beginnings in 1835, when William Henry Fox Talbot
(1800–1877) fixed negative images on paper coated with
light-sensitive chemicals, a process by which multiple
prints might be produced from a single exposure. Slightly
earlier, Talbot’s French contemporary, Louis J. M. Daguerre
(1787–1851), had developed a similar process that fixed
the image on a polished metal plate. Unlike Talbot’s prints
(produced from paper negatives), however, Daguerre’s
images could not be reproduced—each was a one-of-a-kind
object. Nevertheless, in the next decades, his more widely
publicized and technically improved product, known as a
daguerreotype, came into vogue throughout Europe and
America, where it fulfilled a growing demand for portraits.
Gradual improvements in camera lenses and in the chem-
icals used to develop the visible image hastened the rise of
photography as a popular way of recording the physical
world with unprecedented accuracy.
Photography presented an obvious challenge to the
authority of the artist, who, throughout history, had
assumed the role of nature’s imitator. But artists were
slow to realize the long-range impact of photography—that
is, the camera’s potential to liberate artists from repro-
ducing the physical “look” of nature. Critics proclaimed
that photographs, as authentic facsimiles of the physical
world, should serve artists as aids to achieving greater
Realism in canvas painting; and many artists did indeed use
photographs as factual resources for their compositions.
Nevertheless, by mid-century, both Europeans and
Americans were using the camera for a wide variety of other
purposes: they made topographical studies of exotic geo-
graphic sites, recorded architectural monuments, and
produced thousands of portraits. Photography provided
ordinary people with portrait images that had previously
only been available to those who could afford painted like-
nesses. In the production of portraits the daguerreotype
proved most popular; by 1850, some 100,000 were sold
each year in Paris. Such photographs were used as calling
cards and to immortalize the faces of notable individuals
(see Figure 28.4), as well as those of criminals, whose “mug
shots” became a useful tool for the young science of crimi-
nology.
Some photographers, such as the British pioneer Julia
Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), used the camera to recre-
ate the style of Romantic painting. Imitating the effects of
the artist’s paintbrush, Cameron’s soft-focus portraits are
Romantic in spirit and sentiment (Figure 30.8). Others

used the camera to document the factual realities of their

time and place. The French photographer Gaspart-Félix

Tournachon, known as Nadar (1820–1910), made vivid

portrait studies of such celebrities as George Sand, Berlioz,

and Sarah Bernhardt. Nadar was the first to experiment

with aerial photography (see Figure 30.14). He also intro-

duced the use of electric light for a series of extraordinary

photographs that examined the sewers and catacombs

beneath the city of Paris.

Inevitably, nineteenth-century photographs served as

social documents: the black-and-white images of poverty-

stricken families and ramshackle tenements (see Figure

30.5) produced by Thomas Annan (1829–1887), for

1835 William H. F. Talbot (English) invents the

negative–positive photographic process

1837 Louis J. M. Daguerre (French) uses a copper

plate coated with silver to produce the first

daguerreotype

1860 production begins on the first Winchester repeating

rifle (in America)

1866 explosive dynamite is first produced in Sweden

1888 George Eastman (American) perfects the “Kodak”

box camera

Figure 30.8 JULIA MARGARET CAMERON, Whisper of the Muse

(G. F. Watts and Children), ca. 1865. Photograph.